


Anthemoessa

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: Hannibal (TV), The Fall (TV), The X-Files
Genre: Gen, clone club - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 19:37:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4758428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A show like Orphan Black where Gillian Anderson plays Dana Scully, Stella Gibson, and Bedelia du Maurier and they all go around not putting up with nonsense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anthemoessa

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to dashakay for beta and general enabling.

That Phoebe Green brought this to her attention is somehow the most rankling thing about it, Scully thinks. She and Stella Gibson sit across from one another in overstuffed leather chairs, the kind with nail heads that make her think of Masterpiece Theater. She is embarrassed that the house intimidates her with its looming grandeur. The fireplace is oversized, ornate, and even the burning logs are picturesque. Scully wonders if Bedelia laid the fire herself or if she hired someone. She has the general sense that, when possible, Bedelia hires someone.

Scully looks at them, a pair of cool blondes in silk blouses. Bedelia’s skin is flawlessly made up, every hair on her head satin-smooth. Clothing perfectly tailored, her shoes a week of Scully’s pay. Stella wears no makeup, her face freckled and sunlined. She dresses well on a detective’s budget, J. Crew and Banana Republic or their equivalents, Scully guesses, but certainly nothing bespoke.

She wonders how they see her. Doctor and copper, the midpoint where they meet.

Stella swirls the amber liquid in her rock glass, her expression weary. “I didn’t really believe it until I arrived,” she says. “And even now…”

Bedelia, brooding at the window like a Hitchcock femme fatale, judges her wine fit for consumption. She pours herself a glass from the decanter, expression neutral. “So this makes us what, then? Sisters?”

Her sister is dead; these women will never be her sisters. “It makes us genetic identicals, I presume.”

Stella sets her heavy glass on a coaster. “That sounds like a roundabout way of saying clones, Agent Scully. Is that what we are? Someone’s  _project_?”

Scully hears the cold disgust in Stella’s voice, an echo of her own violations. Where to begin? How to make these women understand the world they’ve all entered? Stella’s sharp competence and Bedelia’s watchful hauteur make them survivors, surely. They share that, at least. “I believe so, yes. I've…I’ve seen such things.”

Bedelia walks over her Persian rug with feline grace and Scully admires her, identical but not. The three of them are, admittedly, a fascinating study in nature versus nurture. “What have you seen?” she asks, perching on a chair without seeming to touch it.

Scully tells them of the Litchfield Experiment, the sociopathic children, the mad women.

Stella closes her eyes.

“There’s more, isn’t there?” Bedelia asks gently.

Scully stares down at her hands, at their hands, at the hands that held Emily. There can be no secrets now. “I had a daughter,” she says, and doesn’t look up. She can feel the glance they exchange. “But she wasn’t mine, she was never mine. They abducted me and they…it was medical rape, is what it was. And I never knew her until she was dying.”

“Jesus,” whispers Stella.

“They,” Bedelia says. “Who?”

Scully gazes into the fire. “I don’t know. But whatever they did to me left me infertile. It gave me cancer.” She touches the back of her neck and wants to scream at the brutal injustice of being barcoded and tagged. At having been manufactured. “My partner. His sister was taken too. Cloned. As a child.” Her speech has a hard, staccato sound in the cavernous room.

“It’s unlikely you were partnered by coincidence then,” Bedelia observes. “Forgive me for being indelicate, but did he father your child?”

The $64,000 question she’s scarcely asked herself. Leave it to the psychiatrist, Scully thinks. “If he did, I don’t know about it.”

“I can’t have children,” Stella says. “I found out when I was fourteen.”

Scully offers her a sad smile.

They both turn to Bedelia, who sips her wine. “I elected to have a tubal ligation when I was young,” she says in her precise, clipped way. “So I don’t know whether it would have been a possibility or not. But I would not have made a good mother.” There is something in her eyes that makes Scully uncomfortable.

Stella reaches into her briefcase and withdraws a manila folder. “When Inspector Green made me aware of the situation, I took the liberty of compiling dossiers on each of us. I’ve brought three copies. It seemed the best way for us to check the information and look for similarities.” She passes them each a stapled packet. “Naturally there are numerous gaps to fill in, but it’s a start.”

“Thank you,” Bedelia says, turning the page. “I confess, I haven’t been quite myself since Dana called.”

“The career similarities are peculiar,” Stella says. “You’re both doctors; is there some kind of science that would allow for that to be, I don’t know, programmed in?”

“Doubtful,” Bedelia says. “More than likely the careers are functions of temperament. All of us compelled to help those who are most vulnerable and Dana has doubled, as it were. I should, in fact, like to administer some assessments later on.”

“What,” Scully asks. “Like Meyers-Briggs? Hogan?”

Bedelia smiles indulgently. “A bit more sophisticated than that, but you have the idea.”

Scully doesn’t know how she feels about the idea of Bedelia du Maurier getting inside her head.

They peruse the dossiers, reading their lives in parallel universes. Stella has created bulleted timelines, pictures when possible. Scully touches her father’s face, sees the picture of Missy from the memorial service. “I was born in February of ‘64, but you’re both in April of '65,” Scully says. “And you were both adopted.”

“My biological mother was a young relation of my adoptive mother’s,” Bedelia says, with faint distaste. “She found herself in a compromising position and my parents took me at birth. No siblings.”

Scully looks at Bedelia, tries to imagine her as the illegitimate daughter of some teenaged girl. Surely her Greenwich childhood was full of smocked dresses and summers by a lake. Violin lessons, or piano at least. A pony.  

Stella marks something with a highlighter. “I don’t know very much about my biological parents. I was adopted at birth as well. Nothing unusual at home, only child.”

Her voice has enough breeding for a background similar to Bedelia’s, Scully thinks, or there was sufficient proximity for her to have absorbed certain characteristics of it. The childhood address in the dossier is meaningless, and she makes a note to ask Mulder what he knows from his time at Oxford. Stella seems to have a certain proletariat sensibility to her, though.

“Which leaves me,” Scully says.

“Which leaves you.”

“Three siblings,” Bedelia reads, then looks up. “Your sister. That must have been difficult.”

“Thank you, it was.”  _Is._

“You were born in hospital to William and Margaret Scully.” Stella says. “Any reason to think you’re not their biological child?”

“Of course not!”

Bedelia cocks her head, seemingly intrigued by Scully’s quick defensiveness. “You said the Litchfield Experiment was run by the military, did you not? And your father was a Navy man.”

Scully holds her anger the way she has trained herself. “My father,” she says, with measured frost, “was above reproach.

"Let us hope so,” Stella replies. “But fathers have secrets too.”

Bedelia’s arched brow is a golden imitation of Scully’s own, her smile the Mona Lisa’s.

This is a nightmare, it has to be a nightmare. Any minute she’ll wake in her own bed to the ringing of her phone, Mulder’s voice on the line. She’ll be out of this stone fortress of a house, away from these cold women. No letter from Phoebe Green hidden in her bedside table.

“Your hair is red,” Bedelia observes. “I wonder why.”

It seems an innocent remark, but Scully believes she has the woman’s measure better than that. “Stella has freckles,” she points out, and is startled by her own accusatory tone.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Stella snaps. “Shall we strip and look for witches’ marks? Third nipple, anyone?”

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another,“ Bedelia quotes airily, draining her glass.

Stella gives her a cold look. "In any case, Dana seems to have several notable distinctions from both of us. I think that’s where we need to start.”

“Start what?” Scully asks.

“Investigating this, obviously. What did you think we were doing?”

Scully drops her head back, staring at the ornate molding on the ceiling. A log pops, echoing, and Scully is suddenly aware that the room is cold despite the fire. “No.”

“Don’t you work for the Federal Bureau of  _Investigation?”_

She returns her attention to them. “And in that capacity, I have been down this road before. I can assure you both it leads nowhere but frustration. These people, they’re not accountable to any system we can access. Justice is merely a function of utilitarianism to them. I will not drag my family into this any more than I already have.”

A long silence before Bedelia speaks. “I’m inclined to agree.”

Stella slams her glass to the table. “Then what the  _hell_  did I come here for?” She gets to her feet, stalks the room with her arms crossed.

“Knowledge gives us agency,” Bedelia replies, returning to the decanter. “But it cannot guarantee redress. Wine, Dana?”

Scully wonders if the wine is what keeps Bedelia so docile. She also suspects that whatever Bedelia is drinking is far superior to anything she’s likely to be able to afford. “Please.” She accepts the glass, watching as Stella continues to pace, angry.

“What redress can there even be?” Scully asks her. “Compensation for being born?”

Stella stops in her tracks. “How can you even ask that? You, of all people! It’s heinous, it’s violating, it's…” She pinches the bridge of her nose, shakes her head.

“If it’s an experiment,” Bedelia says. “Someone must be observing it. Dana, you said your daughter was unknown to you until shortly before her death.”

Scully swallows a mouthful of the velvety wine. “Her adoptive parents had a deal with a Dr. Calderon. Ernest Calderon.”

“So what does this mean? We each have someone observing us?” Stella points at Scully. “Your partner. You said his sister was part of this.”

“No,” Scully says, adamant. “Mulder’s as much a victim here as I am.”

Stella snorts. “Your father is irreproachable, your partner is irreproachable. I suppose Bedelia and I are the fools who trust too much. How convenient for you.”

Bedelia tosses her hair, scornful.

Scully chews her lip. “We can’t do this, we can’t start accusing one another. What do you want, Stella? Arrests? A trial? You’ll never get it.”

Stella grinds her teeth but says nothing.

“I have questions about the Litchfield children,” Bedelia says. “About their…irregularities.” The strange gleam is in her eyes again, and Scully looks away.

“It’s getting late,” Stella says. “I propose dinner before we discuss things further.”

“I prefer not to dine out,” Bedelia says. “But I have a…friend who cooks for me. His discretion is impeccable. Shall I call him?”

Scully and Stella exchange a questioning glance. They cannot imagine Bedelia making do with a cop’s cheap lo mein or greasy pizza. “If you trust him,” Scully says, “then so do we.”

Stella gives her a small nod in reply before returning to her chair. She looks drained beyond jet-lag and Scully thinks there are many things they could talk about.

Bedelia walks to the phone. “Neither of you are vegetarians, are you?”


End file.
